a personal take on webstock 14

Feb 18th, 2014

After each Webstock I return with the idea that I should be doing something better; starting of course with writing up my experiences there. It doesn’t happen (with my passive phrasing right there pretty much symptomatic).

This year I won a free ticket, which was very nice indeed. I resolved that because of this I should really really make the effort this year to write it up. Unfortunately good intentions didn’t really result in an epic write-up for each talk. I got partway through this and gave up.

Scott Berkun

First up was Scott Berkun. I had not heard of him before. He’s spent a year working for famous blog software company Wordpress, and was asking the question: what value does Management have when all the creative challenges belong to the workers?

Good question, if you are in a narrow range of jobs for which that applies. The answer sounded like: workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your trousers!

You see, I get a feeling of dissonance about the whole pants-free thing. I don’t know about you, but when I think of pants I think of trousers and underpants. So pants-free working therefore implies some pretty horrific mental imagery when thinking about others taking up the practice, as well as a frisson of danger when applied to oneself (after all, laptops can get quite hot).

Josh Clark

I should have heard of Josh Clark. I would have had I done any due diligence on the speakers. My bad: I’ve been busy. He seemed like a really nice chap though.

His issue was that our gadgets just don’t work together too well. Which is true; but the film of cynicism on my glasses had carried over from the last speaker and I couldn’t help feeling like this was a classic First World Problem.

It brings us sadnessOur gadgets don’t kōrero.Bodge up with more tech!

A First World Problem that of course, people will make billions of dollars from.

Erika Hall

Aha! A speaker I had heard of - I knew that she is part of the same design firm as last year’s quite good speaker (but not really the star of the after-party) Mike Monteiro. Her talk was pretty cool: we have lots of data; we think it explains everything… but it doesn’t.

Meaning is tricky.Stories have power. DataExplains partially.

I was struck with the thought that we seem to have replaced our reliance on reductionist approaches to explaining the world with the opposite: a big-data statistical prediction of it. Neither tell human stories.

Aarron Walter

This chap came from MailChimp, which seems like another nice internet company. Carrying echoes of the other speakers he spoke of “designing for emotion”, and turning data into information into knowledge into wisdom. All good stuff.

Yeah, he lost me right when he mentioned his fantastic intern looking at 10,000 customer emails in a week, a performance that Got Him That Job! I wondered if he was a paid intern. I hoped so. And I hoped like hell that that unpaid intern cultural thing does not make it to New Zealand.

Dan Saffer

Designing with Details
At my current place of work we’re building an app, so I was pretty interested in what Dan had to say.

Little things matterImbue feeling, qualityHumanise your work

This was the most conventionally useful talk for me. I’m now waiting for his book to arrive.

Liza Kindred

I was not a fan of this talk at all - but others seemed to get more out of it.

Nelly Ben Hayoun

Crafting the impossible

Ben Hayoun was an incredibly charming French person who seems to have blagged her way into the most amazing jobs. Once again, it’s clear that talent gets you part way there; but self-confidence and risk-taking will take you to the end.

Discover futuresExtreme experiencesHammer ooh la la

I have this feeling that she’d make the most amazing star of a documentary. But given that she had instructed that no recording be made of her talk I am guessing that it probably won’t happen.

Jen Bekman

Stick around and fix it - there’s no video of this one either.

Made Art a habit.Business blew up. Held through withDoge and the Right Thing.

Persist and fix your mistakes. This was an interesting contrast to a later talk about the value of quitting.

Derek Sivers

Lame summation

So that was Webstock 2014. There’s always too much to think about at these events - which is no bad thing - but it does mean that a summary will never do it justice.

If there was one thing which this and recently past Webstocks have hammered home is that we have to be a bit more conscious of our actions as technologists. We’ve built great things, but also some very anti-human things too.